


“Dear heart, how like you this?” (seasoned traveller remix)

by oonaseckar



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Adopted Sibling Relationship, Gen, Home, Homesickness, Independence, Leaving Home, Sibling Love, Siblings, political disagreements, visits home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-15
Updated: 2014-08-15
Packaged: 2018-02-13 06:44:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2141046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oonaseckar/pseuds/oonaseckar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remix of unveiled's lovely autumnal 'Named Herein', jumping a fair way into the future.  Mystique isn't regretting her choices: she only regrets that it's not possible to have it both ways.</p>
            </blockquote>





	“Dear heart, how like you this?” (seasoned traveller remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [named herein](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1074416) by [unveiled](https://archiveofourown.org/users/unveiled/pseuds/unveiled). 



_"An American passport is a privilege, not a 'right'," he said.  
____

_"I've never wanted to meet anyone I've been introduced to. I want to meet all the other people... I can't explain..."_

Both from _The Dud Avocado,_ , Elaine Dundy.

xxx

Magneto takes her travelling, all right. Bloody hell, not half. One holiday spot after another, all around the globe, gets just a little too hot for the likes of them, year after year, month after month. Sometimes they can't settle for more than weeks. And sometimes it's not even that, before something pings on Emma's radar, before a snarling, grumbling Az is pressed and re-pressed into service, before Erik is tracing a finger through a list. Of possible destinations, of contacts, of people who owe him favours and people who might do him a favour, for a _quid pro quo_ she's better off not asking too much about.

She meets people, all right. Perhaps, most of them, not quite the dazzling strangers, the attractive men, charming girlfriends, amusing eccentrics she'd imagined, when she was starved for company, stuck with Charles. The proportion of criminals, perverts and reprobates is rather higher than she'd have freely chosen, mutant and otherwise. But the seamy side has its own glamour. Or it did, before she got quite so familiar with it.

She meets the Krays, that's her story to dine out on! (Everyone's met the Krays, at a certain point in British history, amongst a certain segment of British society. Or claim to have, at least. The allure of gangster chic is intense, if it's not _you_ they're profiteering and racketeering and muscling protection money out of.) But she really has: even if she was wearing her pretty blonde mask at the time, with Reggie sneering faintly, a lovely pin-curled coiffed young man on his arm. Scrupulously courteous, he was, however. More so than Ronnie, who pinched her arse and commented on her tits and offered to get her a courier job with a jeweller friend. Transporting hot rocks in her cleavage or other intimate spots, she rather thought, judging by the nudges and sniggers.

Erik got along fine with them, and the lissom young man, too. He still gets cards, from their old Mum. She thinks him a nice Jewish boy, who should make an honest woman of Mystique. It pleases him, she can see. Maybe in her company, that's what he is.

Her passport is pristine, leaves pinched together from disuse. She hasn't seen the inside of an airport in years, but she walked down the Champs Elysée last week, hunted in the Black Forest a month back. What she was hunting, better not to ask. It was blue and vicious and feral, a danger to the cause in its psychosis. She felt odd kinship, and regret.

It's not like she never visits. Back to the mansion, maybe twice a year on average, more in a peaceful year though how often do they have those? Secret, cautious, sometimes not so secret, with an unofficial nod from Erik. She suspects he does the same, but they don't talk about it. Charles doesn't talk about it. He avoids the subject completely. Perhaps he doesn't discuss her with Erik, either.

Apart from Charles, it's not a warm enthusiastic welcome. Charles enforces civility, but the rest don't truly welcome her, especially not Beast. Worth it, though, for a few evenings in the library with her head in his lap, him reading her Trollope and Dickens, she prodding him about getting a TV in there, wonder of the age. Telling him stories about masquerading as Brian Epstein, getting past security in Shea Stadium and pinching a Beatle's notebook of lyrics backstage, the fun of it. (She doesn't tell him stories where someone winds up dead, or felonies are committed. He knows: he doesn't need to hear about it, in their sweeter sibling times, that's all.)

These are brief interludes. She can't go home again, not for good. She's committed herself to the cause. It's not that she's trapped with Erik, with the Brotherhood. She made an informed decision, and the years have only confirmed it. She's not Patty Hearst, and this isn't the Symbionese Liberation Army. Brainwashing and coercion are not his favoured tactics. 

Fundamentally she still agrees with Erik, still disapproves of Charles' policies of appeasement and hiding. The years have only lent a mature force to her arguments. Not that she argues with Charles, not any more. They have better pastimes, are halfway children again for the duration of her visits. Their last visit was mostly about real board games – she'd hidden the chess board. Prodding at him until he agreed to a dose of the serum, and a night of Twister with half the X-Men, popcorn, pinball, a movie. She'd bankrupted him in Monopoly, hunted him down in Cluedo. (Wolverine had won the Twister, unfairly agile, his claws an outrageous advantage in stretching to distant corners.) In the morning it had been excruciatingly hard to leave.

But she can't stay. And anyway, she'd never hear the end of it, from Charles. His sensitive, tactful silence on the subject would deafen her.

Magneto's contempt wouldn't wither her soul half so much.

There's always another job, another emergency, another duty to the mutant cause. She can never forget her duty for a moment, Erik won't let her. She feels every bit as trapped, sometimes, as she ever did in the mansion, the Paris apartment, in Oxford with Charles. Wasn't the point to fly free like a bird? Now she's a trained working hawk, baffled, hooded for meekness, a shackle on her leg. She can fly, all right. She just can't keep _on_ flying: always has to head back to the wrist she launched from, back to base and the master falconer, to seek out further instructions. Wings don't equate to freedom, only continual flight and more flight.

On a visit home, she finds a poem by Sir Thomas Wyatt – she finds it in Charles' library – and it mewls about change: _now they range, busily seeking with a continual change...._ It makes her furious, and when she works out why, she's more furious than that.. _...to seek out newfangleness,_ she thinks, and she thinks there was not _one thing_ wrong with that, nothing. She was young when it was done, and her life was intolerably stifling, and she had to choose between home and freedom, which equates pretty much to herself, to being her own self. Because it seemed she wasn't allowed both.

Now, though. It's not that she's tired of freedom: just that it's part of her now, settled in her bones. She'll take it with her when she leaves. If she leaves. Wherever she goes. If she goes.

She wonders how far Charles would have, could have caged a foster-brother with her powers, instead of a sister. She wonders very much, but she's less and less interested in apportioning blame.

She wants cocoa in the mansion kitchen. She never wants to meet another sodding person who isn't Charles, making her that cocoa. She wants dinner with the same person, the same people, every night, Charles boring her with thrilling tidbits about genetics and the school, the comfortable lulling tedium of same-old love. Things should be the same, not different. Things should be homely, and boring. She'd like the chance to be bored again, the kind of boredom that means you're where you belong and you know it inside out, soup to nuts. Fat chance, now. She'll always be running towards home, now, home, home, and nothing's ever going to be home again.

**Author's Note:**

> Title and further quotes are from Sir Thomas Wyatt's lovely poem 'They Flee From Me', which might perfectly summarise the relationship between Mystique and Charles. Also quoted is Elaine Dundy's 'The Dud Avocado': Mystique and Sally Jay have a lot in common.


End file.
